


The Aftermath

by AvocadoQueen



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Depressed Dean Winchester, Fix-It, M/M, Post-15x19
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:07:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27621113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AvocadoQueen/pseuds/AvocadoQueen
Summary: And life went on. Everyone Chuck dusted was brought back. Jack became the dust and the wind and whatever. Sam moved in with Eileen. Everything was set right again. Everything, that is, except for a gaping hole in the shape of an angel in a trench-coat.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 6
Kudos: 101





	The Aftermath

**Author's Note:**

> I have been a huge Destiel fan for YEARS. I've read the fanfiction and the headcanons, I've obsessed over YouTube compilations, I've over-analyzed every single line and too-long stare and wink (seriously though, no platonic friends wink at each other that much). I've never written a story myself, though, because I could never seem to get the characters right. I don't know if I've done Dean and Cas justice in this story, but after I watched The Scene in 15x18 and the aftermath in 15x19, I just had to write it. I don't know what will happen tomorrow in 15x20, but I am (perhaps foolishly) hoping for a reunion of some sort. If not, I'll just set myself on fire, it's fine.

_“I love you. Goodbye, Dean.”_

Castiel’s last words echoed in Dean’s tortured mind as he stared at the empty space that held his best friend just moments ago. Though he’d lost Cas more than a few times over the years, this one felt more final, more real, than any time before. This time, there would be no miracle resurrection, no spell to reawaken the blue-eyed angel. Cas was really d-

Dean’s mind stumbled over the word, unable to voice the reality even inside his own head. Distantly, he registered that his phone was ringing, but he couldn’t bring himself to try to care. All he could do was sit on the cold, stone floor, staring at the empty room as if he could bring Cas back through sheer force of will.

The image of the angel’s face, vulnerable and open and filled with terrible, glorious happiness as he confessed feelings he believed were unrequited, was seared into Dean’s mind, branded onto the insides of his eyelids. He couldn’t rid himself of the sight of those blue eyes, boring into Dean’s very soul, filled with tears that fell in rivers. Castiel sacrificed himself for Dean with a smile on his face, all the while believing that the hunter didn’t love him back. And Dean didn’t do anything to stop it. He didn’t even say it back.

Dean’s ass was numb from sitting on the floor, his eyes burned with the need to cry, his back ached from hunching into himself, but he couldn’t really feel it. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t cry. He couldn’t answer the phone. He couldn’t save Cas. He couldn’t say the one thing he’d been longing to say, aching to say, needing to say for so many years, because the person who needed to hear it was d-

So he sat. He sat, unmoving, unseeing, unhearing. He sat as his phone rang again and again. He sat as the world fell apart around him because his world was gone.

* * *

And then somehow he found the strength to get up. He answered the phone. He listened in silent horror as Sam frantically explained that everyone was gone. He found a dog. He lost the dog. He yelled about the dog. He didn’t feel any better after yelling.

And then he got the call.

He knew it was impossible. He knew it couldn’t be Cas. He knew, even as he answered the phone and heard Castiel’s deep, gravelly voice, that there was no way his angel was really talking to him. But there was a part of him that hoped. Somewhere deep inside, his cold heart jumped at the thought of seeing Castiel again, and all suspicion, all hunter’s instinct left his body. He bounded up the stairs, heart pounding, and wrenched open the door. When he saw Lucifer’s smug face, he broke all over again.

But he forced it down. He schemed and plotted and planned with Sam. He lied to Michael. He set the trap. He let Chuck beat him bloody, and a dark part of him welcomed the pain because at least it was something other than the terrible numbness consuming every inch of Dean’s being since Cas d-

And they won. They beat Chuck. They beat _God_. And for a moment, for just a moment, Dean wanted to fall back into old routines. He wanted to succumb to what everyone thought, wanted to be Dean, the Ultimate Killer, wanted to tear Chuck into tiny little pieces just because he could. But he didn’t. He remembered Castiel’s face, his eyes, his tears, his smile, his words. Dean was not Daddy’s Blunt Instrument. He was not the Ultimate Killer. He wasn’t, because Cas told him he didn’t have to be. 

So he walked away. It didn’t fix the numbness, but it eased it ever so slightly because he knew Cas would be proud of him.

* * *

The day after the Winchesters defeated God, Dean locked himself in his room and drank until he passed out on the floor, one hand still wrapped around the bottle of whiskey. He dreamed that night, strange vivid dreams filled with startling blue eyes filled with tears and a haunting smile in the face of certain death and unreturned declarations of love.

The next morning, he poured every ounce of alcohol in the bunker down the sink.

* * *

And life went on. Everyone Chuck dusted was brought back. Jack became the dust and the wind and whatever. Sam moved in with Eileen. Everything was set right again. Everything, that is, except for a gaping hole in the shape of an angel in a trench-coat.

Dean may never see himself as the man Castiel saw, loving and caring and generous, but he vowed to try to be that man. He would not waste the life that Castiel had sacrificed himself to save. He resisted the urge to drink himself into oblivion. He resisted the urge to jump into the Impala and drive and drive and drive until there was nothing but the road.

He went to dinner at Sam and Eileen’s every Wednesday night. He cleaned the bunker top to bottom. He went on weekly hunts with Charlie and Stevie, but his obsession with saving people and hunting things faded from a burning need to a dull ache. He never rushed in anymore, guns blazing, as he had in his youth. He even smiled sometimes, although it rarely reached his eyes.

And every night, Dean tried to find a way to bring Cas back. Research was more Sammy’s thing, but Dean didn’t want to bring his brother into this, didn’t want to drag him away from domestic bliss with Eileen to cobble together some half-assed plan that may not work. Dean knew he could’ve just asked Jack to bring Castiel back, knew he was a coward for not doing so, but he couldn’t bear the possibility of Jack telling him it couldn’t be done. Or worse, flat-out refusing. So he read every single book in the bunker. And when he didn’t find anything, he read them all again, more carefully, scanning every single page for even a sliver of hope. He wouldn’t give up on Cas. He couldn’t.

* * *

“Hello, Dean.”

Dean’s eyes snapped up from his reading on ancient Peruvian resurrection spells, half-expecting to see Castiel standing in front of him in a trench coat as if nothing had happened. Instead, Dean was greeted by Jack’s half-smile and head tilt, looking so much like Castiel it was almost unbelievable that Jack wasn’t the angel’s biological son.

“Hey, kid,” Dean smiled sadly at the resemblance. “What’s up?”

“It’s been eight months, Dean,” Jack frowned. “Why haven’t you asked me yet?”

“Asked you what?” Dean’s brow furrowed as he pretended he didn’t know what Jack was talking about.

“Why haven’t you asked me to bring back Castiel?”

Dean’s heart stuttered at the sound of Castiel’s name. He closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, took a breath, and resisted the urge to scream at Jack. “I figured if you could do it, you’d have done it by now,” Dean said evenly.

Jack’s frown deepened. “I’m not going to bring him back just for you to hurt him again,” he murmurs softly. “You have to want it enough to say it, Dean.” And with no further instructions, Jack disappears, reverting back to the dust and the wind and all that bullshit.

A year ago, Dean would’ve yelled. He would’ve shoved all of the books off of the table, stomped around, punched a wall. He would’ve gotten drunk. Now, though, he simply sat and stared at the spot Jack occupied moments ago, feeling a strange and horrible sense of deja vu as images of tear-filled blue eyes flashed through his mind.

* * *

Every night for four months, Dean prayed to Jack, asking him to bring Cas back. Every night for four months, there was no response.

Finally, on the one-year anniversary of the Empty taking Cas, Dean was losing his mind. He was inches away from driving to a liquor store or driving off a cliff, whichever one he could find first.

“ _Please_ , kid,” Dean begged, staring at the ceiling and feeling like a fool. “Please bring him back.” Not for the first time, Dean was furious. What kind of stupid test was this? Jack wanted him to say it. He was saying it. He was asking - no, begging - the kid to bring back the man Jack saw as his father; it shouldn’t be this hard. What more did Jack want him to say? What was left to say? Jack should want Cas back just as much as Dean did, Jack loved Cas-

Oh.

 _Oh_.

“God, Jack,” Dean muttered. He took a deep breath, steeling himself to say the words that had been at the tip of his tongue for over a decade, the words he could never utter for fear of rejection or humiliation or judgement. “Jack, please bring Castiel back. I need him. I…” He trailed off, then swore loudly. Dean was a coward, even now. Even with everything on the line, he still couldn’t say those stupid words. He screwed his eyes shut and was greeted by the image he saw every time he closed his eyes.

Tear-filled blue eyes. Haunted smile. Cracking voice. _“I love you. Goodbye, Dean.”_

Dean opened his eyes, determination renewed. He would not allow that to be his last memory of Castiel. “I love him,” he whispered. Then, louder, “I love him.” He cleared his throat and said it again. “I love him, Jack. Please, I love him. I lo-“

“Dean,” a gravelly voice interrupted Dean’s prayer. For a moment, Dean was sure he’d imagined it, positive that stress and loss and lack of sleep had finally done what decades of monsters couldn’t and driven Dean Winchester utterly insane. Then, it spoke again, more insistently this time. _“Dean.”_

Dean turned slowly, and there, standing in the middle of the room, was Castiel, wearing that same damn trench-coat he always wore. His eyes were as blue as ever, his frown achingly familiar, his head tilt even more endearing than usual. Dean’s breath caught in his throat. After eight months of researching, four months of praying, a full year of grieving and missing and needing Castiel, he was right there. Right in front of him.

Dean didn’t cry. He didn’t yell or whoop or jump for joy. He walked to Castiel, those five steps feeling for all the world like five miles, and put a hand on his shoulder, gripping the familiar material of the trench coat in his fist. And unless Dean was experiencing tactile hallucinations, Castiel was actually there, right in front of him. His mind went empty and he promptly forgot everything he’d been dying to tell his best friend for a year.

Castiel was speaking, his voice as low and grumbly as Dean remembered. “Dean, I was in the empty and then I saw this light and-”

“I love you, too.”

Castiel blinked. He opened his mouth, shut it, then blinked again.

“I love you, too, Cas,” Dean repeated. “And not because of your powers or what you can do, not because I need you for a mission or to save the world again, but because you’re smart and generous and…and constantly confused.”

“I see,” Castiel responds solemnly, sadness seeping into his eyes. “You love me in the way that you love Sam, or perhaps a family dog.”

“What?” Dean demanded, confused and slightly scandalized. “I definitely do not love you in the way that I love Sam, or-or dogs.”

“I don’t understand.” The angel looked so lost, so tentatively, heartbreakingly hopeful, that Dean could only be slightly annoyed at how obtuse Cas was being.

“Oh, for the love of-” Dean muttered, then seized Cas by the lapels and tugged him in for a surprisingly gentle kiss.

Cas froze for a moment, his hands hanging at his sides in absolute disbelief, but when Dean’s lips started moving against his, the angel snapped out of his stupor. He wrapped his arms around Dean’s waist and kissed him back tenderly, pouring every ounce of the longing and wanting and hoping and loving he’d felt over the past decade into the movement of his lips, his tongue, his hands. 

There would be time later for passion and heat, for bare skin and teeth and gasps in the dark. This kiss, the first kiss, was an exploration, a declaration, a question and an answer. It was awkward and sloppy and long overdue. It was perfect.

**Author's Note:**

> Can a girl get a comment?


End file.
